Chapter 15

Book Finders

Austin, Texas

 

Hector Castillo squirmed and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Cruz entered the building across the street twelve minutes ago, and since then, Hector hadn’t heard a word. The leather creaked as he shifted again, trying to find a comfortable position for his aching bladder. How long did it take to break in and kill two people in their beds? They should have been finished, everyone long gone before the cops showed up.

He checked the clock again. Thirteen minutes. Hector liked the little dial-type clock, along with all the other amenities in the big Chrysler. It was a real gangster car, black and shiny and tough on the outside, creamy leather on the inside. If the cops ran the plates, the car would come up clean. But the stainless steel Smith & Wesson .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol on the seat would be a problem, as would Hector, a Mexican with an arrest record in two countries.

Hector had the motor running, blowing the air conditioning to keep out the muggy air and mosquitoes. The AC fan and the engine made so little noise that he had no problem hearing the shriek of the emergency exit when it sounded. The trucker burst out of the building and curled into a crouch, his handgun tracking like a turret from left to right.

Hector’s bladder clenched in pain. What? Why is he out here? What happened to Humberto?

The trucker apparently didn’t spot Hector behind the tinted glass, since he jogged for the corner across the street to Hector’s left. The man wore jeans but no shirt and no shoes.

He’s going around back! Hector jerked the handle and butted his shoulder into the door. He grabbed his gun and radio on the way out. Each hand filled, Hector’s heart thumped. His tongue buzzed with fear. Aiming one-handed, he swung the weapon to bear on the trucker. His thumb stabbed for the push-to-talk button on his radio.

Boom! The concrete at his feet exploded. The trucker skidded to a stop and spun to face Hector. The passenger window next to Hector crunched and shattered. He never even heard that shot.

“Fuck this.” Hector dived back into the car.

Another round from the cannon slapped into the roof, blowing a hole through it and thudding into the upholstery. He tossed the gun and radio on the floorboard and slapped the shift lever into Drive. Huddled behind the dash, Hector stomped the gas pedal before the transmission engaged, causing the car to leap ahead. The rear window starred from another impact. Hector didn’t know which gun had caused it, and he didn’t care.

He floored the accelerator, and the big car flew, engine winding up with a powerful hum. He peered over the dash enough to keep the car in a straight line but didn’t sit all the way up until he was six blocks away from the bookstore.

Twelve blocks away, blowing through another stoplight, he realized his pants were soaked.

Yeager paused, making sure Hector wasn’t coming back and none of his friends were coming out to play. The taillights of the big Chrysler bobbed up and down as it bounded over a dip in the road, sparks scattering from the undercarriage. He jogged halfway into the street and looked up at the shattered third floor window and waved an “all clear.” Charlie appeared, waved back, then disappeared.

Not every day that you ran across a woman who’d back you up in a gunfight, he mused as he trotted for the street corner, and with a gun big enough to launch a space shuttle.

On his first tour in the sandbox, a grizzled sergeant from Alabama with service medals dating back to the Spanish-American War had taught Yeager about tactics in a firefight. Once, seeing a squad pinned down in a box canyon, Yeager had scrambled up, ready to charge headfirst into the firefight.

Sergeant Masterson had grabbed Yeager’s arm and pulled him back down. “Hold up, boy.”

“Fuck ‘hold up,’ Sar’nt,” Yeager, then a Private First Class, screamed back. “We gotta bust those guys out.”

“And we will, son. But one thing you gotta learn is how to hurry carefully.”

That lesson became Law Number Five: Hurry carefully.

It came back to him from time to time, especially when he forgot something important, like reconnaissance. He rounded the corner and sprinted for the alley. He was already past the second watcher before he realized there was one. Stepping out of a dark gap between two buildings on the other side of the four-lane street, the slender, dark-haired man wasn’t much more than a flash of motion in Yeager’s peripheral vision.

Sergeant Masterson had once addressed the platoon. “In most firefights, civilian and military, the number of rounds expended exceeded those few that make contact with their intended target by an order of magnitude. In the grip of adrenaline, even trained marksmen can blow through entire magazines at astoundingly close ranges and hit nothing more than dirt.” Then he spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the dusty Afghanistan road. “If I see any of you pussies wasting ammo, shooting without looking, going full rock ’n’ roll, or trying any Wyatt Earp trick shots, or using your weapons in any manner except aimed, disciplined fire, you better hope the Tally-ban gets you before I do.”

Yeager was glad his old sergeant couldn’t see him being a total jackass. Yeager registered the movement to his left and classified it as a threat, processing the information through his combat-trained mind at overclock speed. Before the thought had fully transformed from recognition to conscious reaction, he was sliding to a stop and pivoting left, weapon locked in both hands, torso rotating. The target picture coalesced over his sights, and Yeager instantly confirmed “threat” and “weapon,” at the same moment his finger took up slack on the trigger. It was the most heinous violation of Masterson’s rules that Yeager ever committed: a snap shot in the dark, at a moving target more than thirty yards distant.

But it hit the would-be ambusher—dead, solid, perfect—center mass. The guy spun backward and landed in a pile.

I wish Por Que had seen that shot. He’ll never believe it, not for a minute.

Yeager shook off his own shock and continued his run for the alley. He paused at the corner—better late than never—to check for more watchers.

Book Finders occupied the entire corner of Fifth and San Jacinto. The alley behind the building extended a short way before the cut-out for the dock indented to the right. Yeager’s rig took up most of the free space. He had left it backed up to the overhead door, parked parallel to the alley. A van, presumably the assailants’, blocked the lane.

Yeager skirted the van, checking the interior for the enemy before moving past it. He winced as sharp bits of gravel and other debris jabbed at his bare feet. A can tinkled down the alley when an unexpected gust of wind rattled through the night. A bite of cooler air followed, blowing off some of the muggy heat and chilling the sweat on his bare chest.

Moths battered the single, murky sodium vapor light mounted over the dock. A car horn blared, followed by a squeal of brakes, the sound muted by the intervening distance of several streets. Close by, nothing moved, and no traffic passed. Fifth and San Jacinto were unaccountably empty.

Where the hell is everybody? Downtown Austin on Friday night, even at three o’clock in the morning, there ought to be people. Kids partying, delivery drivers, cops, something. It was a mystery he didn’t have time to solve.

He checked around the front of his rig and found the warehouse door mangled, hanging open at the top of a short stairway.

Fidel and Juan couldn’t find the sprinkler riser anywhere inside the warehouse perimeter. When they looked outside, they finally found a door on the exterior wall labeled Authorized Personnel Only.

“In here,” Fidel said and popped the door with his pry bar.

Pay dirt. The room was a simple square of concrete, reeking of dust and cobwebs, containing two standing pipes with a huge valve in the middle of each. The valves, mounted about waist high, were controlled by large wheels, like those on a submarine hatch. Each wheel had a padlocked chain running through it, locking the valve open to prevent the kind of damage they intended to inflict.

“It’s locked,” Juan said and raised his Mossberg pump shotgun, holding the muzzle an inch from the dangling padlock on the right-hand riser.

“No!” Fidel screamed.

Juan frowned at him. “What?”

“You will kill us both, stupid.”

“Don’t call me stupid.”

“I will call you stupid if you shoot that gun in here.”

Juan looked around and apparently reconsidered the idea of firing a shotgun inside a closet-sized room full of concrete and steel. “Okay, genius, how do we get the lock off?”

“With this.” Fidel slung his assault rifle and inserted the tip of his pry bar inside the one of the chain’s links and started to twist.

The door swung shut behind them, and Fidel cursed until Juan dug out his flashlight and pointed it at the chain. Inside the enclosed space, they were sweating and panting within seconds.

“Did you hear that?” Juan asked.

“What?”

“It sounded like gunfire.”

Fidel shrugged. “Probably Humberto, bravely killing more stairs.”

After a few minutes of grunting effort, Fidel snapped the links on both chains. Seconds later, the sprinkler riser valves were closed.

“Come on.” Fidel mopped his face with the tail of his snap-buttoned shirt. “Let’s tell Humberto so we can get this over with. This job has been a fucking nightmare.”

“No shit.” Juan twisted the handle and shouldered open the door.